The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Virtual server operating systems and applications may be rapidly provisioned and de-provisioned in a cloud computing environment. However, once a configured server either in a traditional data center or as a virtual machine becomes available to a cloud consumer, the steps are substantially similar whether one is upgrading an operating system, middleware, and/or an application. Thus, the time needed to carry out these upgrade tasks is comparable, regardless of whether the system is a physical server or a virtual server. Moreover, downtime and application unavailability caused by an outage, cancelled update, or prolonged update may potentially pose a risk to system availability and/or meeting service level agreement objectives. As such, challenges may exist in upgrading such systems.